Why Clinton will lose (unless he's very lucky).

In the world of political journalism, one of the strangest items of conventional wisdom floating around for the past few months is that President Bill Clinton is likely to be re-elected in November, 1996. I don't say he will definitely not be re-elected; politics, after all, is a very uncertain business. But I say he's the underdog; if he wins, it will be a great upset. I'm also saying that his underdog status should be perfectly obvious to anyone who looks beyond the latest opinion polls.

Consider a few long-term trends.

Since 1968 the United States has had seven presidential elections, and the Democrats have won only two. Further, both wins were due to exceptional circumstances: in 1976 Jimmy Carter won when the nation punished the Republicans for the Watergate scandal; in 1992 Bill Clinton won with only 43 percent of the vote.

In other words, the Democrats long ago ceased being what might be called the "normal" majority party in presidential elections, a position they held from 1932 through 1964. By 1972 (the year of Richard Nixon's landslide win over George McGovern) things had shifted and the Republicans had come to be the normal majority.

Despite this, the Democrats remained the majority party in Congress (except for the GOP control of the Senate in the early 1980s), thereby creating an illusion of robust health. Much of their congressional power, however, depended on retaining traditionally Democratic Southern seats. But that situation was bound to end sooner or later, as white voters in the South relentlessly abandoned their old Democratic loyalties. The end finally arrived in 1994, when Republicans, for the first time ever, captured a majority of House seats in the old Confederate states.

There is no demographic mystery as to why the Democrats have grown less and the Republicans greater. In the days of Franklin Roosevelt the two taken-for-granted mainstays of the party were European Catholics and white Southerners. But white Southerners are gone now, having disappeared for a number of reasons: race, moral concerns, upward mobility. Non-Hispanic Catholics, who began their exit from the party later than the Southerners, are less completely gone; but they have largely disappeared, and trend lines indicate they are likely to continue disappearing. In the Catholic exodus, unlike the Southern, race was not a factor; this is why the Southern defection came earlier. But the other two issues--moral concerns and upward mobility--have been the same for both groups.

Over time the Democrats have attempted to replace disappearing Catholics and Southerners with other groups: blacks, Hispanics, feminists, gays. But the number of replacements is smaller than the number of defections.

Worse still, the new recruits have the effect of accelerating defections. For instance, as the Democratic party in many parts of the South becomes black-dominated, whites, even those with little or no racial bias, come to feel it is no longer their party. Just as almost all whites (even liberals) are reluctant to live in a black neighborhood or join a black social club, so they are reluctant to belong to a black political party. Or take California: if you're not black or Hispanic or a feminist or a gay or an ideological liberal, you increasingly feel like a duck out of water if you remain a Democrat.

In their heyday labor unions were a powerful force helping the Democrats. But that heyday is gone. Unions once represented better than 40 percent of the private-sector workforce; they now represent about 11 percent. Labor compensated for this loss by organizing public-sector workers; but once again, defections are more numerous than replacements. In 1960 nearly one-third of all workers, public and private combined, belonged to unions; today the number is less than one in six. Besides, union leadership, though it can deliver money to Democrats, is no longer effective at delivering the votes of its members.

Given these long-term trends, how can a reasonable political analyst think that a Democratic candidate for president, whether Bill Clinton or anybody else, can be anything other than an underdog? But the media look at polls, not history. Like a recovering alcoholic, they live one day at a time. During late 1995 and early 1996 Clinton did well in the polls--better, for instance, than Bob Dole. Ergo, Clinton is likely to be reelected.

This kind of thinking is a sign not just of historical ignorance but of an inability to read opinion polls. "If the presidential election were held today, how would you vote?" asks the typical pollster. They might as well ask, "If you were the president 6f France, what would you do about Corsican terrorists?" But I am not the president of France, and if I were, there is a good chance my Corsican policy would be different from the casual answer I would give to the pollster over the phone. Likewise the presidential election is not being held today; and if it were, the typical voter would be much more focused, and his or her response might well be different from the one casually given to the pollster.

In other words, polls taken months before election day are meaningful only for highly committed voters who are, let's say, 95-percent certain how they'll vote. Early polls are nearly meaningless when it comes to voters with a lower degree of certainty, since most of these people don't have anything that can, strictly speaking, be called an opinion; just as I don't have an opinion on Corsican terrorists, even though I can answer the question asked by the "opinion" pollster. In such cases we have leanings, feelings, inclinations, fancies, hunches, impressions, etc., but not opinions.

Clinton needs a lucky break to win: for instance, a terrible ideological rupture within the GOP, or a significant third-party candidate who will draw votes from the Republicans, or a major scandal connected with Bob Dole's vice-presidential nominee. He may get his lucky break; anything can happen in politics. But until then he's a clear underdog in the 1996 race.